Your students will intuitively understand supply and demand. If they have ever dropped a week's pay on some last-minute concert tickets, they have a grasp on the basics. What you will need to spend more time coaching them on, though, is the concept’s finer points. We still lay a foundation by reviewing the simpler concepts: a graphing exercise will walk them through the basics of supply and demand curves, and an "entrepreneur activity" will encourage them to think about elasticity and inelasticity of demand.

After that, it is time to get more advanced. Upon introducing students to paradoxical demand curves—making sure they recognize the curves' contradictory slope—you can challenge them to reason their way to an explanation.